Posted
by
Zonk
on Sunday August 27, 2006 @02:51PM
from the robo-saget-desires-your-funny-movies dept.

theodp writes "Slate makes a pretty convincing argument that YouTube and its knock-offs can trace their roots back to America's Funniest Home Videos." From the article: "The show's stock in trade was to find the lowest common denominator and then hit it in the crotch. Consider this list of select highlights from the show's 'Best of Kids & Animals' DVD: a kid doing a cannonball onto his dad's groin, a baby running into a church pew, a dog peeing on a wedding dress, and a kid clocking his dad in the nuts with a helmet. While these clips are all certainly lowbrow, they've also got something else in common: They're oozing with family values."

You're missing that the number was inflated to make the joke funnier. 1800 "it seemed" were trampoline mishaps probably because the largest section of video were trampoline mishaps but probably not 90% of them.

Don't know about you, but most of the AFHV's was not that funny or often at all. Most of the videos only would be funny if it happened in person to someone. Instead of them cherry picking what the masses might like, places like youtube let people choose themselves, along with screen any videos instead of a select few.

Well a lot of insurance companies wont insure your home (or at least give you a huge rate hike) if you have a trampoline on your property... next time you switch companies or insure a new place pay attension... I bet they ask you if you have one... Skateboard ramps too.

Now if most of youtube's content could be somewhat funny, or even "slightly more funny than bland humor" I would see comparing it to funniest home videos. Like it is, youtube is painful to endure. I would venture to say countless people singing into a qvga camera isn't exactly entertaining for most of us.

And that is why YouTube != "Funniest Home Videos" - because it's more directly audience driven. I don't think YouTube has a crotch-driven "formula" at all... people upload what they want, then other people watch what they want. YouTube supplies various viewship statistics to help the process along. The result may be that YouTube is lowbrow, but the blame has to be far wider than whoever is providing the bandwidth. It's just usenet for videos.

Funny? "America's Funniest Home Videos" rivals Japanese extreme gore for the title of most concerning social development of the past 20 years. Visual media with no other discernable purpose than enjoying the infliction of pain have been increasing in popularity for decades but those are all make-believe. Week after week of a dim, smarmy host fronting videos of real personal home injuries and harrowing narrow calls crossing over to healthy family entertainment says more about the general public than violent video games ever could.

Youtube may have some low-brow physical humor, but America's "Funniest" Home Videos doesn't have TV clips and music videos. The variety alone places Youtube in an entirely different category. Plus, Youtube doesn't have those annoying voice-overs.

You're kidding, right? Bob Saget's stuff is NOTHING like Full House or AFHV. He didn't even write the stuff on AFHV. That was the producers idiocracy trying to keep it a "family show". I've seen Saget live on a few occasions and he's funny. Go to YouTube and look up "Opie and Anthony"... There is some recent stuff with him in it. It's great!

Personally I think the only reason Bob Saget is funny is because of the huge contrast between his raunchy stand up comedy and his Full House/AFHV persona. If he hadn't done those awful family shows, he would be just another vulgar comedian.

One of the points he makes is that without the goofy voiceover and quick cut to a shot of mom hugging the kid, you're really just watching a video of a toddler hurting himself. AFHV upped the dorky and the bland because otherwise you're watching real life, in which people get hurt and their friends stand around laughing with a video camera.

C'mon, everyone things that watching someone they know misstep and whack their shin exceptionally hard into the immobile edge of a low coffie table is comedy gold. It's perfect, because we all have done it and know it's hideously painful, and know nobody is going to need a trip to the emergency room.

Agreed. Some friends and I have been considering different content delivery systems for a show we're working on and we've ruled out youtube because of their license agreement which basically signs over all content for them to do as they please. Although this is fine for most of the content on youtube (which is mainly pirated, or at the very least not owned by the posters) it wouldn't work for anything that might have a chance to become something more than a free time/for fun atmosphere.

For all its black eyes and unplanned water landings, America's Funniest Home Videos always reinforced the nuclear family as this country's central institution. A child hitting his dad in the groin is a child who's spending quality time with his dad.

Remind me to kick my dad in the balls next time he wants to spend quality time playing Scrabble with me...

I'm 24 years old, and I gotta admit... AFV (America's Funniest Videos) is still one of my favorite shows to watch. Sure, it's mindless content, but no other show on tv packs more laughs per minute.

Maybe it's a bit juvenile laughing at old people falling over, people getting hit in the crotch, or just general stupidity of people with too much time on your hands, but... AFV is basically a bunch of youtube videos strung together, and is funny no matter what age you are. (Just ignore the lame jokes by the host...)

Sure, there's other content on Youtube that isn't of the "funny video" variety, but... I'd say that the majority of the "viral videos" that get spread around the internet are of the funny variety, and what drives the majority of the site.

Just out of curiosity, do you laugh at "Everybody loves Raymond"? Does anybody? I have recently watched a full episode of that show, and on only one occasion cracked the faintest smile. It is so incredibly not funny, I am honestly surprised that even the laughter-tape can keep laughing. Yet, apparently, it does reasonably well in the US.

While some clips in AFV were funny, I wouldn't say it was wet-your-pants hilarious. Is it American humor?

You're not alone. I think these shows survive by attracting a ridiculously small minority of people who think they're funny.

A *really* popular sitcom might get a few million people to watch it every night. Out of a population of 400 million, the actual ratio of people who enjoy that humor regularly is tiny.

My guess is that's it's much easier and cheaper to produce crap and get 30% of an already small audience simply by being slightly less crappy than the competition, than it would be to produce something great and attract more people who would usually do something else.

To get a really huge audience, you would need not only to win over the people who think TV sucks, but also the kind of people who watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" religiously. What kind of show would appeal to both sets of people? I certainly don't know.

And as far as AFV goes, the first show ever was hysterical, and it was all downhill from there. Now you're really lucky if it's as funny as a "Cathy" cartoon.

Just out of curiosity, do you laugh at "Everybody loves Raymond"? Does anybody?

From what I could tell, with my wife and I being married young (19 & 20), and most of our friends up til a couple years ago being single. You have to be married for years to get the jokes, because only after being married for years do you get the reality of the jokes (because you've been there), even if the situations are a bit exaggerated.

You have to be married for years to get the jokes, because only after being married for years do you get the reality of the jokes (because you've been there)

I agree. I never really found it funny when the show was first on the air... but watching reruns with my fiance, we suddenly find it funny. We've been together for over 7 years, and even though we're not married (yet... a month and a half to go), becuase we've been together so long we can see the humor in certain situations becuase we've experienced

However, when I approach the site's front-end, the "most X" (where X is popular, viewed, voted on, or whatever) lineups are jammed full of webcam clips, in-jokes, and episodes of anime. It's a bizarre disconnect.

"YouTube is nothing like America's Home Videos. What a stupid analogy."

Nothing's a strong word. People have a clip they think is funny. They submit it. An audience watches it. The same part of us that finds AFV interesting is the same part that wants us to sift through the YouTube vids and find something funny.

You can find plenty of differences between AFV and YouTube, but to say they have nothing in common is absurd.

The main thing they don't have in common is that youtube's content isn't decided upon by a small bunch of Hollywood television show producers. It's just there for the viewing. I'm not saying that makes most of it better, but it certainly is more diverse.

The reason AFV & Youtube can thrive is because although they deliver low quality material, they have even lower costs. They survive because they have a viable business model, not because of any deep inner meaning of their content, or because of any particular aspect of modern culture. TFA just doesn't get it.

YouTube has vast amouns of AFV material. REAL AFV material. I just saw today footage of a mother surrounded by her quadruplets and the babies wer eall laughing thier fool heads off. That was from AFV. In fact, some people don't even bother to remove the ABC, Superstation or other bugs on the bottom of the video. Sure, there is some great original stuf out there, but there's a tone of copyrighted material out there. Bab Saget 2.0 is more like Bob Saget 1.0.

But it's not. This video is incredibly old and IS from AFV. It's not at all new. It was stupid then and it's stupid now. The first time you see it, it's mildly funny. The second time, not so funny. The third? Stupid. NOT saying it ain't family friendly but it sure as heck isn't new. This is probably why it's popular.....there's always new mouth breathing internet users who have to learn somehow. They learn by forwarding YouTube links and chain e-mails and e-mails warning me about gettign AIDS from

The purpose of historical analyses such as the ones you mention is to demonstrate that, a) it isn't a recent phenomenon, and b) understand why we do certain things. That is, I think the real insight here is on analysing what home-videos "sell" (ie, become popular) and why, and not in merely saying that AFV was the first.

I've got to tell you, Bob Saget is one of the most respected comedians working today. He's adored by many of the greats, passed on (Rodney Dangerfield was famously one of Bob Saget's best friends) and Penn Gillette (who featured him in "The Aristocrats"). Yes, "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Full House" were terrible examples of what he would do. But go see him in stand-up sometime; he is one of the vilest, funniest, grossest, hysterical comedians you will ever see on stage.

As the german private TV sector struggles to save money wherever it can (having recently survived an almost complete crash) shows such as "clip charts" have sprung up, sampling the silliness that people put up on the likes of youtube.

I'm not sure I agree that it can be traced "back to" a TV show like AFV. That's like saying that because Christianity decries murder and adultery, that any system of morals that incorporate these same values, has its Christian roots. What we're talking about here is universal appeal: they are elements within our social makeup that inspire a natural interest.

However, the interesting thing about youtube is that with few exceptions, it is a relatively unfiltered medium. There is no marketing department behind the scenes deciding what it thinks you'll like. You pick the stuff you do find interesting, and ignore the stuff you don't. I would agree that it's a somewhat tedious process sometimes, but what's nice about the way that youtube is structured is that what started out as a dead end (something uninteresting), can sometimes lead you to something very worthwhile via the associated links that show up, or responses that people other members have posted.

My only gripe really is that I wish people would observe a bare minimum of what makes a watchable video - shooting in near-complete darkness isn't one of them, nor is movement that makes it look like the one holding the camera is having a grand mal seizure.

Most people who avoid myspace are either old farts who criticize anyone under 30, or nerds living with their parents

Or people who recognize it as Geocities/Angelfire 2.0

The concept is good. The execution is horrible. Myspace gives users far too much freedom to destroy their pages with animated backgrounds, unreadable color schemes, and 50 different videos all set to automatically start playing when the page is opened.

The freedom is one of the reasons MySpace is popular. It allows people, as Geocities and Angelfire did (and still do) a great amount of freedom to express themselves. If they express themselves through clashing colours and shitty HTML, that's their business and nobody elses.

I find it quite funny that people (not specifically talking about you) who talk about freedom in software consider freedom a bad thing when applied to normal people making web pages.

Thing is, the content that is there, the comments and the myspace friends mean something to the person that owns the page, which is the whole point of MySpace. And if you use CSS well I'd imagine it's possible to do some great things with a MySpace page. And while the ability to fuck up presentation doesn't necessarily make MySpace great, it's certainly a large factor in its success. Compare the popularity of the far more locked down Bebo.com to that of MySpace.

Of course, radio and television haven't been killed off. What does one listen to in the car? Streaming audio from the internet? Some do, perhaps, but a lot just listen to a local radio station, or XM. When one gets home after a long day and wants to unwind, do they fire up the computer and surf youtube or other sites? An increasing number do, myself included sometimes, but probably not more than the number of folks who

You tube does tap into the "AFHV" vein. Go fish is tapping into a much more interesting conceptual space, where they ar edeveloping online Reality TV. Right now they have a thing called America's Dream Date. People are sending in videos to contend for the prize of going to Paris for a week.

Most of the videos suck. Most of them are

"Hi! My name is Bennifer and I have a great sense of humor, and like to have fun."

Actually, lowest common denominator is okay. For instance, when adding the fractions 1/6, 2/3, and 4/18, you could convert all the fractions to a denominator of 54, as in 9/54, 27/54, and 12/54. But the correct procedure is to convert them to a denominator of 18, as in 3/18, 9/18, and 4/18 (16/18, or 8/9). And the lowest common denominator is only 1 if the numbers are all integers. You can't express 1/6 as a fraction of integers with a denominator of 1.

There is no such thing as the (finite) 'greatest common denominator.' Consider two fractions A/B and C/D. Trivially, BD is a common denominator; you can express the two fractions as AD/BD and CB/BD. If B and D have any common factors, then you can pull these out and make E, where E is the multiple of all prime factors of B and D[1]. E is then the lowest common denominator.

Since E is a common denominator, any multiple of E is also a common denominator. Let N be a natural number. NE is also a common